zondag 4 november 2007

I was contacted by Gray Herter last week because he had seen that I was doing some talks at the EclipseWorld conference in Reston, VA. Gray is one of the officers of the North Virginia Java User's Group and he asked me if I was interested in doing a presentation about jBPM on their meeting of November 7th. As I am always interested in spreading the word about jBPM, this was an offer that I couldn't refuse. So if you are in the neigbourhood, don't hesitate to drop by. You'll find the details about the meeting on the Novajug Blog.

Last Friday, me and a number of other JBossians were present at the second JBUG meeting. It is still a rather small user's group with some 30 attendees, but Nicolas Leroux and Peter Hilton who organized the event told me they did not send out any invitations anymore during the last week because they feared not to have enough chairs. So there is definitely a big potential for growth.

The event itself was much like the first time very well organized, with lots of food and drinks and of course some interesting presentations. The first presentation was a talk given by Bruno Georges about the JBoss Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). He showed the audience by means of an example use case in what ways an ESB should be used. The presentation was topped with a demo that demonstrated the ease of setting up an ESB project in the Red Hat Development Studio.

The second presentation was a joint effort of Peter Hilton and Nicolas Leroux about their experiences with Seam development. The presentation was both very funny as informative. They talked some kind of a very JBossian language by situating their example in a pub and relating the very technical Seam concepts such as conversations and dependency injection to this metaphor. It made their presentation easy to follow and the sometimes complicated topics they treated very easy to understand. I really hope they will be able to spread the word about Seam in this way at other occasions in the future (JavaPolis? Are you listening Stephan?). In any case, well done Peter and Nicolas!